The Total Dark Sublime

I should have booked my flight home for the first thing in the morning.

That was my first mistake.

There were many mistakes made that day, but none of them would have occurred if I had been on a different flight. I had considered booking an earlier flight, but I still had a doomed hope that my trip would have had a different outcome, that there would be something to stick around for.

Of course, if I had had a flight home the first thing in the morning – then that entire long long day (and night) would never have happened.

Do I wish that it hadn’t happened? Honestly? Yes.

But … but … there’s another part of me that knows that it had to happen. Or something like it had to happen. I believe that the unrelenting awfulness of that one day, where I tried and tried and tried to just get to my house speeded up the grieving process I needed to go through. I do believe that if my trip home had been glitch-free, a mere 4 hour flight, I would have had a much longer road to go to find some peace. This is all speculation on my part. It happened the way it happened because things happen like that sometimes. The interpretation is up to me.

I told my friend Brooke the whole terrible story and when it was done, she said, “You know why I think that happened, Sheila? I think it had to be that bad so that you would never ever forget it.”

It’s very rare in life that you have an event where you can look and say: Before it, I was one way … and after it, I was different.

I had gone to Chicago to put to rest some long-lasting unfinished business. I was on a mission. I guess somewhere in my heart I knew the answer would be a “No” but I had to hear it, because it had never been said clearly, and without apology. It was always a “No, but …” and that one little word “but” kept me hanging on. He loved me. The love itself was never in doubt, which made the situation even more unbearable. I finally decided that it was going to take some big gesture to finish this thing, and so I needed to initiate a gesture.

An aside: This whole experience is why I I will call bullshit on anyone who dares to say “Time heals all” to me. All? Really? All? You obviously have never been hurt. Time heals some, sort of … but all? Yes, life does go on, it heals by the very nature of the clock ticking forward, but time heals raggedly, and it leaves scars. You are not healed, you recover from a life-threatening wound. I think I believed the lie ‘time heals all’ for quite some time, and I kept waiting for “time” to do its damn work. But there was only so much that time could do. Time was truly inadequate to the task at hand. A gesture was required.

On a dark sidewalk outside a club on Belmont Street we said goodbye. He looked stricken. I don’t think he realized until that very moment what was happening. He said, in a tone of dawning realization, “Oh no … oh no … so this means …”

It was the stricken look that killed me. For years I had only cared about myself, and what he had put me through, but when I saw that brief look cross his face, I realized his pain, and his loss. This would not be easy for him either.

He tried to hug me. I stepped back.

A look crossed his face which was terrible in its clarity. He looked at me like I was an animal he had just accidentally mowed down with his car.

Frantic, I ran out into the street to hail a cab which I could see careening across Belmont.

The cab driver waited for me to tell him my destination but I was staring out the back window, looking back at him on the sidewalk. He stood there, staring at me. Arms fallen to the side, with the worst expression on his face. I saw nothing-ness on his face. I wasn’t crying, but I felt it coming, a massive black wave towering over my head. I could feel its power, its scope, and knew I am not even going to know where I am for a while when that thing hits …

Even now, years later, I can’t think about what he looked like on that sidewalk without pain.

I opened my mouth to tell the driver where to go. Horror hit me like a sword. I knew the second I started to try to make a sound that black wave would hit … and so I had to be very very careful, and concentrate really hard just to say the address. My voice was not my own in that moment: it was deep and hard and deliberate. A dybbuk. A voice of certainty, who knew where she was going. Then we were off and somewhere between Belmont and Montrose, the black wave hit. I crouched in the back seat, drowning in it.

Mitchell, of course, was waiting up for me when I walked in.

He held me on the couch, and I cried myself to sleep in his arms. I cried as I had not cried in years. I was breathing through the tidal wave: I would come up, gasping for breath, trying to make it through, and then it would crash over me again. I had put off the confrontation with the storm for WAY too long. There was an awful familiarity to it. I had anticipated it, dreamt it, lived that awful future, the future with the “No” in it. Now it was here.

And so that is why I say my big error was not having booked my flight for first thing in the morning. I did what I had come to do. Time to go HOME and meet the beginning of the rest of my life. My life without that hope I had been carrying around. I had to get home, to see who I would be in this new world … I had to get home immediately. But like an idiot – I had booked the flight for 4 pm, to give myself a little leeway, just in case the outcome would be … what I had hoped for.

Mitchell woke up and had to go to work. Which left me alone in his apartment.

The sun was blinding that day. I wished it would rain.

I was out of my mind.

Kate called. We got together at Einstein’s Bagels on Southport. I had a mound of napkins on the table, and I kept breaking down and Kate kept handing me another napkin. She said what I have now come to realize is the truth: “You needed to do this, Sheila. It had to happen. Now maybe you can go on. Now maybe you can be happy.” In the moment, those were terrible terrible words. I kept seeing that one brief stricken look on his face.

There was then a strange mix-up with time: While we were talking, Kate, in a sudden frenzy, realized she needed to be downtown in 10 minutes and so she had to hurriedly say goodbye to me and race off to the L.

Mitchell worked on Southport, so I stopped in to talk to him at work. I had on dark sunglasses, and I was not in control of myself. Everything grated. The sun, people’s laughter, people strolling by with coffees, normal life going on, everyday life continuing, it was unbelievable to me that I would not always feel the way I was feeling in that moment. Mitchell was busy so I figured I would walk back to his apartment. That would kill some time.

I started back up Southport, and had to sit down in a doorstep, out of the sun, in a blessed spot of shade, to drown in the wave again. Drenching my way through my leftover napkins.

At one point I became aware, dimly, of someone screaming my name. It didn’t seem real … who would be calling me from 2 blocks away, shouting, “SHEILA! SHEILA!” I stepped out of the doorstep, and racing towards me was my beautiful friend Kate, who had realized, while standing on the L platform, that her watch was wrong and raced back up the street to find her friend in need. I can’t even tell you how good it was to see her. Even though we had just left each other. And the hilarity of it, the hilarity of her literally racing off to make it downtown, when all the time it was that her watch that was wrong, made my wave recede a bit. We went back to Einstein’s Bagels and sat there, howling with laughter about Kate’s watch, and the insanity of her suddenly saying to me, her friend surrounded by a mound of tear-soaked napkins: “I’m so sorry – but I have to go! Right now!!!”

By the time I got back to Mitchell’s it was nearly time to leave for the airport. I was a bit cried out for the time being, so I packed up my things, feeling pale, almost see-through, and called a cab. I sat in the back of the cab, slumped down, staring at the familiar streets and buildings zoom by, looking back over my shoulder to the glorious skyline of downtown Chicago, wondering when I would see it again. Occasionally, I would feel a random stab of pain somewhere in the solar plexus area but I was a bit more in control now. I was able to say to the stab: “Okay. Stop. No more for the moment.”

If I had been conscious of my surroundings, or in an analytical frame of mind, I would have immediately discerned at O’Hare that something bad was going on. I walked by all the gates, and I saw all the red-lit-up signs: “FLIGHT CANCELLED” “FLIGHT DELAYED” “CANCELLED” “DELAYED” but I didn’t really put it together. I had no idea it would have anything to do with me.

The wave was still there, battering at me, but for the time being, I was fighting it. If I had been able to see clearly, I would have seen: the long long lines at every gate. I would have seen: the throngs of people on their cell phones, pacing around. I would have felt that something was going on here … something bad …

At that time Mitchell was reading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and I had read a little bit of it during my brief stay with him and thought: Okay. I need to read this book immediately.

It seemed very important. The book had to do with grief. Or something. Whatever it was, the book called to me. Mitchell was in the middle of it so he could not lend me his copy. I walked into one of the little book stores in O’Hare and looked for the book which had just come out and was a HUGE best-seller. Everyone was talking about it, it was everywhere. But the bookstore didn’t have it.

I was not really “myself” at this point, in case that wasn’t clear already. I was fragile to the point that I was wincing at the harshness of the sun. I had very simple needs: Breathe. Get on the flight. Get home where you can lick your wounds in private. Also: buy Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

I asked the cashier, “Do you have Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius?” Cashier looked at me like I was nuts. I had on dark sunglasses. I was pale as death warmed over. He said, “What?”

And suddenly, out of nowhere, rage. Rage so sharp and violent it exploded within me, fully realized and enormous. I didn’t lead up to that rage, it arrived suddenly, larger than life.

I said, sneering, “It’s # 1 on the New York Times bestseller list right now. You work in a bookstore. You haven’t heard of it?”

“What’s it called again?”

I thought I was going to lose control of myself. I turned around and walked out of the store, literally trembling with rage.

I got to my gate, where a line had already formed. I was so angry about my inability to buy Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius that I could have eaten nails at that moment. Every time I thought about it, and every time I thought about the cashier not even knowing about it, the rage would explode again. I itched for a fight. I felt dangerous.

I was so self-involved that I didn’t notice that the line wasn’t moving.

What follows is, I realize, just part of traveling. Flights get delayed, canceled, and it’s always annoying, inconvenient, irritating. It’s a part of life. I have been in this situation a million times before and handled it with aplomb. But this time I had no reserves. And also: it wasn’t just a flight to me. It was an escape. It was symbolic. For years I had lived with one foot back in Chicago. But that was going to stop now. I lived in New York. No more looking back.

The flight attendant at the gate called out to the crowd: “Okay, I have an announcement to make! This flight has been canceled! All flights into JFK have been canceled!” There was a big thunderstorm and there were no flights going into New York or into Newark. She kept shouting, “You have a couple of options – you can try to get yourself onto the next flight which is tomorrow at 6 am .. or – you can try to get onto a flight that is going into White Plains – and that plane leaves in 15 minutes from Terminal C.” Which was all the way across the airport. 15 minutes? White Plains? How do you get from White Plains into New York? How … what … what was I to do …

I had no time to dilly-dally; I had to decide then and there what to do. The thought of going back into the city, and back to Mitchell’s, and then spending another night, only to wake up at 4 a.m. to try to get onto another flight … and I might not even get on that flight! – was unthinkable. But also unthinkable (especially in my broken frame of mind, where I had almost started shouting at a poor cashier in a book shop in O’Hare) was racing across three terminals with all my bags to try to get on a flight to … White Plains?

This is when things started breaking down. The Sheila as I knew her started disappearing. I did not know who this new creature was but I had never met her before, and she was terrifying.

The next 30 or 40 seconds where I was unable to make a decision were psychically shattering. My breath started rising, higher and higher and higher. I had never had a panic attack before so I did not recognize what was happening. Immediately, I thought I was dying. I could not catch my breath, and every time I started to realize it, it got worse, until I was literally panting like a dog on a hot day. Second of all, along with the physical side of panic, you get the psychological side. And psychologically, during a panic attack, you start to feel all the walls closing in around you, pressing in, tunnel vision, you have no way out.

That second sensation brings with it such a feeling of overwhelming doom that the entire world was suddenly blanketed by it.

Since I had never had a panic attack before, I couldn’t talk myself off the ledge. To me, it was all totally real. And I felt overwhelmed by a bad feeling of such a deep dark magnitude that it was like something out of Melville.

And I don’t know what it was, it certainly wasn’t an intellectual decision, because there was no brain at work her, but I decided to make a run for the White Plains gate. It was just unthinkable to contemplate staying in Chicago one second longer.

I started running to make it to the gate on time.

I ran and ran and ran, while in the throes of the panic attack. I was heaving my breath in, but it just stayed way up there in my throat, that was the worst part about it: there was no release. Everything gets tight and high and taut. It was so frightening that I remember having a brief moment of feeling like I should call out into the crowds, “IS THERE A DOCTOR HERE? I NEED HELP.”

Once at the White Plains gate, I was faced with yet another line by that point I knew that I was way too out of control to be in public. I was not just on the edge, I was over it. I still could not breathe, and I still felt this portentous overshadowing of doom. There was also the big black wave from the night before. That was still there as well. I was in the maelstrom.

I should have been lying under cool white sheets hooked up to an IV with a white curtain between me and the rest of the world, not trying to battle it out at the crowded White Plains gate.

The line was moving very slowly. There was a man behind me chomping at the bit to get on the plane. I could feel his hot panting breath on my neck. The line wasn’t going anywhere, but he couldn’t deal with that. He was pushing in on me from behind. As we waited in line, I started to feel that rage coming up again. That irresistible yearning for a fight. It felt very male. I wanted such a big fight that I would be dragged off screaming by the cops. I had to concentrate on my breathing to keep the rage down. Finally, I was next in line.

Apparently, the guy behind me felt that I should also breathe down the person’s neck in front of me. He didn’t like that I left a small space between me and the person being helped at the counter. He thought I should move forward. So he made his fatal error. He nudged me.

I turned around and I said, totally calmly, “Sir, if you touch me again, I will take you out.”

He saw the look on my face, and got completely flustered and said, “I just … want to get on the plane …”

He nudged the wrong girl on the wrong day. I said to him, slowly, fearless now: “Sir, everyone wants to get on the plane. Someone is already at the counter? It is not my turn yet. Stop breathing down my neck, I am warning you. Back off.”

He physically backed away from me. Smart man.

Then it was my turn. I now felt stricken. I remember. I remember approaching the gate with this stricken feeling all over me. Stricken by my own stymied travel plans. And also stricken by the unfairness. I know life is unfair but on that day I had had enough. I wanted ease. I wanted comfort. But the universe, categorically, said, “No.” to my request.

I got on the flight. I got in my seat. I took the blanket on my seat, put it over my head, and cried quietly for the entire flight. I slept a little bit too, tears still on my cheeks, woke up, would cry some more, go back to sleep. The world felt jagged to me, broken glass shivering through the air. I was too sensitive to be out in the world on that day, definitely too sensitive to be dealing with jostling crowds, harassed flight attendants, and annoyed passengers.

This story just keeps getting longer and longer so if you think I’m about to wrap it up, you are wrong. Like I said way back at the beginning: this day was long, and it felt like forces were conspiring against me. Great and mighty forces. It even trickled down to the weather. The weather reflected my emotions. Everything got so global that there were times, later, when I felt like my own psychic state of mind was actually creating the weather. I know that some people live in the state I was in on that day, and my heart truly goes out to them.

By the time our plane landed in White Plains it was 9 p.m. A rainy night with intermittent flashes of lightning. I have never flown into White Plains. It is in Westchester but since I don’t have a car, I didn’t have my bearings at all. I had no idea how to get into the city.

Then came an event which basically messed up the rest of my night and took me well into the next morning. I got off the plane. I hadn’t checked bags. I wandered around for a second, salt from my tears crusted on my face. I was looking for anything, any sign of what to do next. Train? Cab? Metro North? In the middle of this disorientation, I suddenly had to go to the bathroom. So badly and so suddenly that I almost didn’t make it. I had no idea where to go and I honestly could not take the time to go ask someone at the counter. The need to “go” came over me with the suddenness of an alarm bell going off. My body betraying me. I was then running through the tiny White Plains airport, sweat breaking out on my forehead. Finally – I saw the tell-tale “Women’s” sign across the room. Frantically, I raced towards it, only to find they had a bar across the door, telling me, yet again, “No”, I couldn’t go in there because they were cleaning in there or something. I didn’t care. I ducked under the bar and raced into the bathroom.

I was in there for half an hour. I was as sick as I have ever been. It had me in its grip, and it wrung me out, wrung me dry. I was AS sick as if I had eaten a bad burrito in a small Guatemalan village. I thought it would never end.

This is when I started to think I was dying. I thought … this is it … I am not going to make it out of here … This is the end of the road …

Later, I would look back on my miserable half-hour in that bathroom in White Plains and remember the end of Catcher in the Rye, and how one of the last moments is Holden, in the museum, having diarrhea in the bathroom stall, and then passing out. That’s the second to last scene. It was the only way his body could tell him: Holden, you need to slow down. Betrayed: when you need to be strong and resilient and your body will not obey.

The ramifications of my bathroom-emergency ended up being enormous.

Because I was in there for half an hour I missed the next train to New York by one minute and then had to wait an hour for the next train. An hour might not seem like a lot but in my state of mind it was an eternity. I was not mentally calm enough to write, or read. All distractions were closed off to me. And since I missed that train, the rest of the night and next morning became a spiralling comedy of errors, mistake piling up on mistake, until basically, instead of walking into my apartment an hour and a half later, which I would have if I had caught that train, I walked into my apartment over five hours later.

Finally, feeling trembly and weak after the misery in the bathroom, I limped out into the main room, feeling lightheaded. Dehydrated. My face was drenched in sweat, and my teeth were rattling. I did not feel at ALL well. I had no idea if I was “done” or not. The thought was terrifying, that I could be trapped somewhere, on a train, on a bus, and have THAT come over me again. I considered just sleeping in the airport all night just so I could be near a bathroom.

I knew I looked like hell but something about being sick like that made me not care anymore if people saw me at my worst. I had been trying to hide my puffy eyes, and trying to “keep it together”. Fuck it. No more. I needed to get home. And I needed help. No more “be strong, buck up, be strong”. Nope. Enough. I needed help.

I walked up to the transportation desk. I was wearing sunglasses (it was nighttime), and I had on a backwards baseball cap. The second I started speaking, the tears started coming back, and I talked through them: “I need help. I need to get to New York. How do I do that? I’ve had a terrible trip. I want to take a cab. How much would that be?” He gave me the price, which was way out of my range. He told me that there were regular cabs to the Metro North station not far away, and he suggested that I go there and take the train into Manhattan.

I said, “How long will that take?”

“The train ride is an hour long.”

“Is there a bathroom on the train? I’m very ill right now.”

“Yes.”

It wasn’t even close to being what I wanted or needed.

What I wanted or needed was a magic wand to teleport me into my bed, or at the very least a time machine that could take me back to a moment when I could have heard “Yes” instead of “No.

I stood outside, in the soft rain and the dark, and continued to concentrate on my breathing, which was all I could do at that moment. Keep it even – in, out, in out, in, out. It took all my energy just to do that.

I had to share a cab ride to the Metro North station with three other people. By this point it was blessedly dark and rainy, which made me feel protected and invisible. I sat in the back seat, staring out at the dark ranks of trees, the quiet wet streets and I felt a profound sense of dislocation from all the known world. Where was I? Who would I be now? Without him? Where was I?

As I got out of the cab, I heard a tran leaving the station. I immediately got this really really bad feeling. I knew that that was the train to New York. I raced up the steps to the outdoor platform and saw the train flying by.

I turned to a man sitting on the platform. “Was that to New York?” He nodded.

I said, knowing the answer would be bad, “When’s the next train?”

“An hour.”

A thud inside me that made an echo it was so deep. In my normal life, having an hour to kill is nothing, because I can always read. But on this endless night? It was almost more than I could stand. If I had only been able to buy Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius … That book I might have been able to read.

The rain started to pour down. I stood on the platform, unable to do anything but stand there, and try to breathe. I kept seeing his stricken face … his laugh kept coming to my ears … all this loss, this disappointment, this unbelievable sense of how unfair it all was … just kept crashing over me. Wave after wave. Thunder rumbled in the sky. And purple lightning flashed above the shiny darkened office park across the way.

I remember seeing the first flash of purple, and thinking to myself, “I should just go find a hotel and check myself in for the night. I need to be in bed.”

Then – in the next moment – a finger of ice scraped down my back, and I felt the danger in that option. I felt the danger in the wash of relief I felt. I knew that I was not safe with myself, definitely not safe if I went and checked into an anonymous hotel.

Nobody knew I was in White Plains. Not one person. Mitchell and Kate in Chicago probably assumed I was home by that point. It suddenly was essential to me that I let someone know where I was, so that even though I felt all alone out there under the purple lightning, even though I was all alone, I would at least have the protection of knowing that there were people out there on the planet who knew where I was.

I did not have a cell phone, but I did have a phone card. I went to a payphone on the platform and started making calls. I called all these people and just told them where I was, which, in retrospect, was not a good idea because I freaked a lot of people out. Many of my friends thought I had finally snapped when they heard the messages. Of course I tried to be totally calm in the messages, which made it even worse. My friend and roommate Jen later played me the message so I could hear what she heard and I was shocked. Even 5 days later, that time on the train platform with the purple lightning felt like a million light years away. My voice had this high floating unhinged sound. I sounded detached and in complete disarray.

I was trying to calm myself down and remain calm and I ended up freaking everybody out. I called Kate, back in Chicago, which was truly unfair because even if I were really in trouble, there was nothing she could do from where she was. I left this unearthly eerie high-voiced message on her machine: “Hi, Kate … I’m standing on the train platform in White Plains and there’s purple lightning and I can’t seem to get home …”

The rain was sweeping sideways across the platform as I made my calls. The world felt brutal and comfortless. I didn’t understand why I had been banished from comfort.

I then called my friend David, who was the first one to pick up. The second I heard his voice say, “Hello?” I broke into stormy sobs. The second he heard the sound of sobs across the line, he said, “Sheila?”

What then followed is one of those extraordinary moments of friendship that can save your life if you let it. David has a busy life. He is married. He has two young children. He has a home life. His time is not always his own. But he cleared the deck for me that night. I was able to tell him, once I was able to talk, that I was stranded in White Plains and I had an hour to wait for the next train, and I had diarrhea and I was afraid that nobody on the planet knew I was alive and the lightning was purple and “he said No” – … etc. So David stayed on the phone with me until the next train pulled into the station. 50 minutes later. David would not let me get off the phone until he knew I was safely on my way home and not buffeted about in the winds of White Plains.

He talked to me. This was so long ago now and I really am over it but writing it all down brings back my desolate mood. He listened to me talk. He kept saying, “You are going to be fine. You are so courageous. You are so courageous. Do you know how many people would have flown back to Chicago just to get the answer? You did. You’re courageous. You are going to be fine.”

By the time the train pulled in, the tide had receded, and suddenly I was so exhausted that I was almost asleep standing up. David said, gently, “Okay. So go on the train now … try to get some sleep … you’ll be home before you know it … call me tomorrow …”

“Okay …”

“You are going to be okay, Sheila. Not tonight. But you will be okay.”

I shuffled onto the Metro North train. The fluorescent lights insulted me, burning into my ravaged salt-scraped skin, but I did find the deep leathery seats soothing. To sit … to be able to sit … to know I was almost home … I was actually able to do a little bit of a crossword puzzle on the journey which was definite progress. And then I passed out, waking up when we pulled into Grand Central.

Ahhh … Grand Central. Almost home. All I needed to do was grab a cab home. It would be a splurge, yes, it would be 40 bucks probably, but I was not taking any more chances. I wanted no more delays. It was now 12:30 a.m.. I couldn’t believe I had been traveling since 3 p.m. the day before. A trip from Chicago to New York had, so far, taken me 9 and a half hours. It was outrageous.

Grand Central is surreal even on a bright sunlit day. The cyclorama above the main concourse, the glittering constellations, the marble statues with billowing marble robes on the facade. It’s a pre-Christian environment, pagan, grandiose, classical. I walked through the echo chamber of the main concourse to get to the street, again feeling like the outside environment was somehow being created by my inner turmoil. I was “going back”. I was re-claiming something. I was “moving through” something. And it hurt like hell. But like the Auden poem says:

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Walking through the concourse at Grand Central, looking up at the dimly glittering constellations painted on the ceiling makes me think of that.

At least I was off the scary train platform in White Plains, with the purple lightning, and the shiny dark office park. That was the nadir.

I climbed into an available cab on the street and negotiated the price, which is always kind of difficult when you’re going to Jersey. A lot of times you get aggressive angry attitudes from drivers about prices to Hoboken but I lucked out with this driver, who said, “What do you normally pay?” I told him. We agreed on a flat fee, as opposed to having the meter running.

Then we were off shrieking across 42nd Street to get to the Lincoln Tunnel.

The rain came down, the city looked like a smudged Edward Hopper. The neon flashed, up, down, over my head, but the streets were practically empty. This took on symbolic meaning to me, at that moment, like everything else did. My world right then felt uninhabited because he would no longer be in it. What would I do without him in my landscape? But there was the neon, still flashing above the empty streets, the empty sidewalks, the neon a sign that there were still people on the planet, that my life was not a ghost town.

The streets were empty now but they would fill up tomorrow.

I settled back into my seat, passive at last. I no longer needed to propel myself forward, make any decisions. I was almost there.

We rounded the corner to get into Lincoln Tunnel, and hit a spot of traffic. I was zoned out in my seat, wallowing in the blessed waters of Lethe for just a moment. At that moment, I was calm enough that I actually believed I might be able to sleep, which was unbelievable. I know what I’m like when I’m on a crying jag. But sunken in the back seat of the cab, with the rain on the window, I felt like I would have a respite, at least on this first night of my new life.

5 minutes of nothing moving passed. I didn’t notice. Because of Lethean dreams of respite.

10 minutes went by. That was when my radar started to perk up. Why haven’t we moved? We were not in stop-and-go traffic, we were at a complete standstill. I sat up and looked around. I saw the traffic stretching out before me, around the corner into the tunnel, and I saw the traffic stretching off behind us, endlessly up the avenue.

My thought process in that moment was: What the hell … why are we not moving. No. No. Do not tell me … what is going on … No … no … no … No …

“Why are we stopped?” I asked the driver.

Thick accent: “I do not know, miss.”

15 minutes passed.

20 minutes.

25.

People were by then getting out of their cars and walking forward to see if they could see what was going on. I was starting to lose control again. I was almost in the Tunnel. The thought occurred to me, Couldn’t I just walk through the Tunnel, like that character in The Stand? I was desperate enough to consider it.

The unrelenting quality of my journey started to hit me at that moment, and instead of getting sad about it, I started to get mad. Incredible Hulk mad. I wanted to punch God in the gums. Additionally, and this made the whole thing even more pleasant, I started to feel like I wanted to crawl out of my own skin. I was twitching in the back seat of the cab, plucking at my coat collar compulsively, rolling up my sleeves, rolling them back down. In many ways I was quite literally beside myself.

Half an hour had now passed. No movement. Not even an inch forward. We were in complete gridlock, hemmed in on all sides.

We were half a block from Port Authority so I said, to no one in particular, “I’m gonna go grab a bus – this is crazy …” Not thinking that it was the tunnel that was the problem, not the cab. And then I looked up at the causeways which lead down from the various levels of Port Authority, and every single causeway was crammed with stalled busses, all the way back up into the building.

Something terrible had happened in the Tunnel. It had probably just happened.

That damn diarrhea. That diarrhea in White Plains was the cause of it all.

If I had been on that first train, I would have hit New York an hour earlier, which meant I would have missed whatever horrible event happened in the Tunnel. The diarrhea put me into New York at just the right moment for me to hit the Tunnel catastrophe, which then gave me an opportunity to get ramped up and crazy again. My physical panic had been an unstoppable force, and the respite was oh so brief.

A line of backed-up busses, all of us on the road to nowhere.

The feeling of being trapped started to become unbearable. I could not think my way out of this one. I could not negotiate my way out of it. Shit happens, right? Shit happens in the Tunnel.

At some point, during this excruciating wait, which now had stretched to 40 minutes long, it became apparent to the driver that I was having some sort of a breakdown, so I felt obliged to explain myself. I said to him, “I’m sorry … I’m obviously having a bad day … it’s totally not your fault … I’m having some sort of panic episode right now … I’m sorry …”

He let me get out of the cab and walk around for a while in the rain. Other people were doing the same thing. He was a kindly man from Nigeria, with deep black skin and gentle eyes. I will never forget his kindness to me that night.

I wandered around, amongst the stalled cars, in the rain, breathing through my overwhelming impulse to scream wildly, claw at my hair, some huge attention-getting gesture of outrage that would land me in the blessed psych ward. Angry. I was Angry that it didn’t work out with that man. I was Angry that I had to let him go. I was Angry that I would meet such a man and then have to let him go.

The driver started talking with other drivers, all of them standing outside their cars, smoking cigarettes in the rain, and let me know that about 10 minutes before we hit the traffic, right around the time I hailed the cab, there had been a horrible accident in the Tunnel with multiple casualties.

I was now in tears. “This trip … I have been trying to get home for 10 hours now …”

45 minutes now. No movement. We couldn’t get out of the line of traffic, we were completely blocked in. But finally, a car in the lane to our left obviously decided The hell with this and he drove up onto the sidewalk to get out of the gridlock. There were cop cars everywhere, he didn’t care, and neither did they apparently. They didn’t stop him from taking his chance, and he drove on the sidewalk to freedom at 9th Avenue. It was exhilarating to watch. Look at him, being all independent and making choices!

There was not a moment to lose. Before the space closed up, my fabulous driver from Nigeria screeched the wheel to the left to get us out of our lane, drove us up on the sidewalk, and we then proceeded to pass by all the traffic, freely, gloriously, on the sidewalk.

My driver said, “I will go to Holland Tunnel.”

Whatever you say, sir.

Once we got to 9th, the road was clear and open. We bounced off the sidewalk, turned right, and then there we were, driving down the avenue at 75 miles an hour. I kept the window open, the rain and wind slapping me in the face, reveling in blessed movement.

We conceivably could have been there for a couple of hours more. Or at least until the cops finally got themselves together to come help us all out of the traffic jam. I felt like I was shedding skins as we drove, leaving the “old selves, old whore petticoats” behind me on the street. There was no traffic going into the Holland. As we careened around the corner into the white-tile Tunnel, I shouted, “WHOO-HOO!!!!” and I saw my driver’s laughing eyes in the rear-view mirror.

The tunnel was a blinding white, the tiles blurring by my eyes – almost there … almost there …

The panic attack in O’Hare dissolving, the ice-cube-down-the-back in White Plains dissolving, everything dissolving at the prospect of getting to my apartment and locking the door behind me … getting out of the public world … and back into the private … where I could start to heal, for God’s sake.

At some point during this careen underneath the Hudson I realized that originally the driver and I had agreed on a flat fee. If the meter had been running that whole time, he would have made a fortune. He really would be getting stiffed by the flat fee, and it just seemed important to me that he get paid properly. He had been so patient with me, so kind. I cried in the backseat of his cab, I clawed at my coat collar, I had sudden outbursts that involved addressing God in an angry fashion.

I had no more money on me, so I asked him if he could stop at a bank first so I could get some money out. He said fine.

We stopped at a bank on Washington. I took out a wad of cash and then directed him to my apartment. I had called Jen, one of the calls I made on the scary platform, so she knew that I would be home late. It was now 3 o’clock in the morning. I had left Mitchell’s apartment, in Chicago, to get to the airport, at 2:30 p.m. the day before.

And Every. Single. Step. of the way there had been an obstacle. It would take me days to recover from the trip.

And no surprise: There was one last obstacle thrown in my path.

What would be my last step? The goal I had been straining towards for the past 12 hours? To walk into my apartment. That was it. But even that …

No comfort, no ease allowed on this endless night.

I said to the cab driver, “I know that you got a sore deal here cause the meter wasn’t running – so please take this -” I gave him a 100% tip.

He looked at me, astonished. “Oh, miss …”

I said, and the second I started talking, waterworks: “I am obviously having sort of a breakdown right now … having to do with something else in my life … and you have been nothing but kind and accommodating to me … and honestly … I cannot thank you enough.”

He said, compassion in his voice, “Oh, miss …”

Then I hauled my sorry exhausted ravaged ass out of the cab and climbed the stairs to my door.

I put my key in the door and pushed, only to find that my roommate had forgotten I was coming in and put the chain on. We were not door-chain girls at all. You really can’t be when you have a roommate, and you’re both coming and going on different schedules. We lived in a small house with 2 apartments and we knew the other tenants.

Why did she chain the door that night? No reason, she did it unthinkingly, it was a total accident.

The chain thing was so out of my expectation that I had a hard time even believing it was real. It would have been weird on any other night as well, we never put the chain on, but it was even weirder that night. The semi-calmness I had found in the back of the cab during the catapult down 9th Avenue and through the Holland vanished.

I had had it.

I started screaming. I don’t remember what I was screaming. I threw my bags down on the ground and started screaming up at the skylight.

In the next second, I would have slammed the door open, which would have broken not only the chain but the side of the door, but my roommate was up, working on her computer, and she heard me start screaming, and I heard her in the apartment call out, “Oh my God – Sheila … Sheila … I forgot … I forgot …” with her slippered feet padding to the door to let me in. She opened the door, her face, her eyes, it felt like I had been away from kind eyes for a lifetime. She said, “I totally forgot – I put the chain on without thinking …”

I came into our apartment at last and everything started reverberating. It was like when you have been roller skating for a while, and then you stop and your whole body keeps vibrating with the remembered movement. The distress I had just been through kept catapulting forward even though I, myself, was now standing still.

Actually, the reverb from that endless journey lasted for about 5 days. It took me that long to stop “traveling”.

I charged into our foyer, dropped my bags in a heap, threw my coat off, and started throwing the pillows off the couch. I threw stuff across the room. I kept screaming. I tore off my shirt and threw it into the corner, urgently: I needed to get out of the clothes that had just made that journey. I was screaming at the top of my lungs and tearing off my own clothes. And demolishing our foyer.

Jen let me do that for a while. She just stood back, in tears, I kept going, picking up an afghan blanket and throwing it across the room. I was screaming about “flight canceled’ and “panic attack” and “White Plains” and “diarrhea” and “traffic jam”, My voice was unrecognizable to me. Harsh, jagged.

Finally Jen said, “Hey.”

I remember just how she said it. It was gentle, but scolding. Not because I was wrecking our room, or because I was screaming at 3 in the morning. Not because I was out of control. It was a scold because I hadn’t given her a hug.

She said, “Hey” in a gentle scold and held out her arms.

I went to give her a hug and once I was in her arms, that was it, I was really home. Safe. We ended up on the futon couch, and I lay with my head in her lap, and I cried like I had been wanting to cry for 12 hours. She smoothed my hair, and listened to me rant and rave, and asked me questions, and she didn’t judge or analyze or try to show me a different side of things. She didn’t ask me to have perspective, or to try to see the bright side. I wasn’t ready for that yet.

The trip itself had been so awful that it sort of wiped away, for the time being, the real reaons for the emotional tumult, and that was the reason I had gone to Chicago in the first place.

In looking back on it, I see that the universe might have had other plans for me. The energy that it took just to get my ass home was so unrelenting that it jump-started me back into life. Ugly messy angry life.

There were no more glittering constellations in the sky that night, except for the phony ones in Grand Central. The light of my life was over. Done.

I wasn’t yet ready to declare the “total dark sublime”. Maybe someday.

It was just going to take me a little time.